Summary
Yellowstone Season 3 continues to build its core storylines in Episode 5, with the flashbacks and present-day both getting more interesting. However, the show still struggles to commit to any major revelations or developments.
It’s clear that Yellowjackets Season 3 has entered more exciting territory now. And yes, I agree it’s about time. But Episode 4 felt like it was going somewhere, with Coach Ben’s trial in the past and Lottie’s death in the present both feeling like big individual moments, enhancing both timelines. Episode 5, “Did Tai Do That?”, continues to build on both of those foundations, and they’ll hopefully both be heading somewhere pretty interesting.
Lottie’s death – which was apparently an accident – is particularly significant because it gives Misty something meaningful to do, and her self-promotion to citizen detective is a good way of bringing all the surviving Yellowjackets together to address what is quite clearly a problem they should be worried about. I like Misty a lot, and in the present day she has mostly been sneered at and left idling, so as soon as I saw her claiming Lottie’s personal effects from the morgue and stealing evidence while she was there, I felt good about this development.
It’s worth mentioning that the others – most notably Shauna – still aren’t entirely comfortable with Misty, and Shauna uses Lottie’s death as an excuse to accuse her of yet another crime. So, she’s determined to solve the mystery not just for Lottie but for herself, so that she can finally prove a point to the others. This works, dramatically speaking. (Also, Misty trying to angrily storm out of her own house is very funny.)
I don’t trust Walter either, while we’re on the subject of Misty. He might have been right about how the other Yellowjackets view her, but his fondness for her still borders on being creepy, as evidenced by the fact that after this meeting he immediately starts following Shauna (who, to be fair, is also following Misty). Walter has shortsightedly appointed himself as Chief Citizen Detective in Lottie’s murder and fancies Shauna as a potential suspect given her history of violence.
Shauna and Walter form a reluctant partnership and end up following the same leads as Misty, who investigates the apartment building Lottie was found in the basement of and discovers her father, who she has been staying with for weeks, still lives there. Misty is looking for Lottie’s missing phone, while Shauna and Walter snoop around disguised as internet technicians, and they both try and sabotage each other back and forth. But you can see that Walter is stepping on Misty’s toes here. He already found and cloned Lottie’s phone before resetting it, which Misty takes rather personally.
Weirdly enough it’s Shauna who points out to Walter that what he’s doing is a little creepy, even going so far as to suggest that he might have killed Lottie to give Misty an excuse to investigate something. This leads to Walter pulling out one of his hairs as a form of exonerating DNA proof, which rattles Shauna a bit, especially when he asks her to provide one of her own, but he gets a strand anyway from the hat she was wearing, which she leaves behind when she understandably storms off.
All this leaves less time in the present day for Tai and Van, who admittedly don’t seem to be reeling as much from the news of Lottie’s demise. They do have other things to focus on – a meeting with Simone and Sammy, primarily – but I also think we’re steadily developing the angle that Tai’s evil half is running the show at the moment. There’s an implication of this in her dialogue with Sammy and it’s also talked about in the flashbacks, bringing it to the forefront of the audience’s mind, which probably isn’t an accident.
Jasmin Savoy Brown in Yellowjackets Season 3 | Image via Showtime
We might as well move on to the flashback stuff since Tai and Van factor heavily. In the wake of Ben’s forced guilty verdict, everyone is trying to decide what his method of execution should be, and it’s eventually decided that a firing squad would be the most humane option. As usual, the girls draw cards to determine who does the deed, and it’s Tai who pulls the King of Hearts, giving her the honors.
Naturally, she isn’t keen on the idea. Van tries to give her shooting lessons so she can at least get used to handling the gun, but she eventually suggests trying to essentially “summon” Tai’s more ruthless persona, and the techniques include having sex, which doesn’t work, and sacrificing a rabbit, which doesn’t work either, although it does stir the wilderness into acknowledging the sacrifice.
Tai’s dark half doesn’t make an appearance until the deed is about to be done. Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 5 really makes a meal of Ben being led to his death with a sack over his head, and every drop of emotion and tension is wrung out of the scene. This, more so than eating each other, is the girls at their most primitive, not doing what they need to survive but embracing their darkest impulses, executing a man for something that at least half of them believe he didn’t do. Tai’s hands are shaking at first, but eventually, they settle, and it becomes obvious her alter ego has taken over. As she’s about to shoot Ben, though, Travis arrives and body-checks Ben out of the way while Lottie disarms Tai. Ben is suddenly off-limits. Akilah has had a vision indicating he is their bridge home.
The vision, for what it’s worth, comes after Lottie, Akilah, and Travis return to the hallucinogenic caves for a spelunking exercise that gives Akilah a vision of Ben as a literal bridge to distant city sounds and lights; to civilization, to home. This development – the others accepting it, anyway – would be difficult to swallow if so much time hadn’t been spent on establishing how much the girls have bought into Lottie’s cultish wilderness religion.
Not everyone is totally on board, though. Later, despite clear instructions that Ben isn’t to be harmed, Shauna and Melissa round on him with a knife. At Shauna’s urging, Melissa hobbles him by slicing his Achilles tendon, ensuring he can’t run away. It’s clearly overkill, but the other girls do seem to have been complicit in it, as though they had to commit some degree of violence to feel satiated after the trial. Shauna, though, clearly enjoys it more than she probably should, and when she grabs Melissa’s bloody hand in front of the rest of them, it’s a sinister statement about who’s really in charge.
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